software - page 46

Bring me the head of Nick Pavis! The CEO of San Francisco-based entertainment software company MunkyFun is ultimately responsible for the two hours I failed to notice ticking by this afternoon while engrossed in his visually stunning, sneakily addicting iPhone game, Ivory Tiles.

With its oddly calming Oriental soundtrack and the realistic sounding slide and click of ivory tiles on a wooden gameboard, Ivory Tiles draws you into the challenge of solving its spatial and geometric puzzles like nothing I have ever experienced. Making excellent use of iPhone’s accelerometer and impeccable 3D graphics engine, the game took me through levels of frustration, elation and ultimately relaxation that I hardly imagined possible from playing a game on a mobile device.

Must. Keep. From. Number. One. Son.

$1.99 from the AppStore; worth ten times that amount. Requires iPhone 2.1 software update.

iPhone beatbox app Beatmaker has been updated to version 1.3, which brings with it some nice new features.

This release is about detail: there’s more detailed edit options in the step sequencer. You can do more with your patterns, they can be more complicated and mixed in more interesting ways.

Editing the whole song is easier thanks to a zoom control and an access bar that lets you jump from one part of the song to another.

Best of all, it’s now a proper sampler. Beatmaker will let you record sounds using the iPhone’s built-in mic, assign them to pads, and use them in songs without any extra fussing about.

Wait, though, there’s more! Have you wanted a pocket Stylophone ever since the 1970s ended? Me too!

Weeeeelllllll…

I like the look of word game Giant Crayon WordSoup – it reminds me of Wurdle on the iPhone, which keeps me occupied for hours, when I can wrench it from my wife’s fingers (she gets addicted and spends the whole evening playing if I’m not careful).

But, um, guys? That moment at 0:54? How can I put this?

Got a big fat PDF? Rather have it split into lots of little jpgs, one for each page in the PDF?

That happens to me a lot.

Jim DeVona’s Save PDFs pages as images Automator app is what you and I need.

It does all the chopping-up-and-separating, then it neatly saves the images in a numbered sequence so you know which one’s which.

You should check out his software page too, it’s got all sorts of goodies for your Mac, especially for Yojimbo users.

Everybody say: “Yojimbo!” There, that feels better doesn’t it?

Some people are frantically asking “WHY GOOGLE, WHY?” but to me it makes perfect sense. Gmail now has a simple task manager and I love it. It works nicely within my copy of Mailplane, as do the keyboard shortcuts. You can enable it from inside the Labs settings tab (which is where you can mess with keyboard shortcuts too).

It made me smile when I looked at the hints. Gmail knew I was using a Mac and showed me the appropriate Command keystrokes to make stuff happen. Move items up and down the list with Command+Up or Command+Down, indent them with Tab, unindent with Shift+Tab. All makes sense.

But my favorite feature is that any email can be turned into a task. These tasks appear with a little “Related email” link so you can instantly see their context.

Bravo Gmail team, a job well done.

Spawn Illuminati (App Store)is a fun and cheap little app for your iPhone/iTouch. You can see what it does; it spawns little blobs of light that respond, in a manner of speaking, to your touch commands.

The commands aren’t terribly intuitive, and the app seems to have a mind of its own half the time, but that doesn’t stop it being fun to play with, especially for little ones. With a bit of practice, you can get some very nice results with it (as evidenced in the official gallery).

And it’s a great way to make a wallpaper image for your iPhone that’s completely unique.

There’s no Flickr grounp yet – gasp! Perhaps one will pop up later on. I would have made one myself, but I’ve got tea to drink.

More floopy screenies after the clicky thing.

Anytime you can pick up something for $50 that would otherwise cost you more than $450, it’s worth a second look. Such steep discounts can be a sign of utter worthlessness in some cases, in others, possibly a short-lived bargain you’re thankful to have come across.

MacUpdate has one such opportunity Mac users might want to take a look at. They even have a cute little countdown clock on the page telling you how long you’ve got left to decide to pull the trigger. At this writing the clock stands at 10d 21h 2m 42s.

Among the software titles in the bundle:

Drive Genius 2 ($99):    Currently the highest-rated disk utility on the market. Used by Mac Geniuses at Apple Stores, Drive Genius diagnoses and repairs problems with your hard drive, optimizes your system, and much more. Buyers receive a link to download a bootable DVD image of the software to burn, which can be used to boot and fix any Mac that can run Mac OS X 10.5, including Apple’s newest laptops.

RapidWeaver 4 ($79):    Create powerful, professional-looking Web sites quickly and easily.

MacGourmet Deluxe ($44.95):    Think iTunes for food – track recipes, plan meals, manage wines, and more.

LittleSnitch 2 ($29.95):    Monitors your network connection to make sure your Mac only sends out what you want it to.

KeyCue 4 ($27):    Displays full keyboard shortcuts for all your applications; learn them and work faster.

MacPilot 3 ($19.95):    Access hundreds of hidden features to customize and improve your Mac OS X experience.

iVolume 3 ($29.95):    Ensures all your iTunes tracks play back at the same level, so you never have to adjust the volume individually.

There’s more. See the post at MacMerc or head on over to MacUpdate. The clock is ticking.

Via MacMerc

You may have heard that one of the linchpins of the federal government’s multi-pronged effort to save the crumbling American economy may include Uncle Sam himself underwriting home loans at 4.5%.

What better time then, to spend $4.99 on an iPhone app that may help you navigate the treacherous waters of real estate finance and help you make sound financial decisions for you and your family?

Foggy Noggin Software’s Loan Shark app is a timely, easy to use loan calculator. Enter the information you know, click a button for the field you want calculated, and Loan Shark fills in the amount for you.

With Loan Shark for iPhone and iPod Touch (requires 2.0 update) you can:

* Enter loans from different banks and save for later comparison.
* Calculate how long it will take to pay off credit cards.
* Determine how much in interest loans are costing you.
* See in real time how an extra payment a year affects your loan.
* Easily compare loans to see which is best.

The app lets you calculate any component of the loan, including payment, interest rate and loan amount; see the full Amortization Table for the lifespan of the loan; set your local currency in preferences; find Banks in your area. It also calculates semi-annual interest for Canada and other countries.

Foggy Noggin has some other cool looking software projects, too, including desktop and cookie managers, so be sure to check out their website.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but Greystripe, a San Francisco-based rich media advertising platform for mobile content claims to have developed ads including Flash IAB medium rectangles and game-in-game (or “tailgate”) ads giving advertisers the ability to target the iPhone audience for the first time with Flash content.

In an effort to make it easier for the online media buyer to purchase mobile, Greystripe claims to have brought creative power to the iPhone with Flash creation tools allowing brands to extend any online advertising campaign directly into mobile content as well as the ability to create miniature advertiser-branded games in Flash and place them before, during or after existing iPhone games.

“Using the iPhone’s revolutionary platform, Greystripe has solved the serving, reporting, third-party tracking and, best of all, ad creation problems that have plagued the mobile advertising industry since inception,” says Michael Cai, Director of Digital Media and Gaming at Parks Associates, according to a BusinessWire release made public on Thursday.

Michael Chang, CEO and Co-founder of Greystripe was quoted as saying, “We have made it easy for advertisers by removing barriers to execution. Brands like Jeep, RadioShack, New Line Cinema, Rock the Vote and Yahoo! have seen strong results.”

If true, this would seem to come as news to Adobe, which claims to have been thus far stymied in the effort to develop a mobile version of Flash that is compatible with Apple’s SDK for iPhone developers.

Have you seen any Flash-based ads on your iPhone?

It’s probably safe to say only the newest of computing newbies may not understand that when you delete a file or “move it to the trash” it stays on your hard drive, taking up space, until you actually go to the trash and “empty” it.

This is actually a wonderful feature because even the most jaded computer professional is only human, and humans of all levels of intelligence and experience have been known to act, from time to time, in haste, without thinking. Sometimes being able to retrieve something from the trash can be the best thing ever.

But here’s something I bet a lot of savvy Mac users don’t know. I didn’t know about it – but I’m only on the just-sort-of functionally literate end of the Mac savvy scale. When you delete a photograph in iPhoto, it doesn’t go to the Trash trash, it goes to the iPhoto Trash. And it stays there until you empty the iPhoto Trash.

I’ve mentioned before in this space that my main computer is a five year old PowerBook G4. It’s a great computer but its 80GB hard drive is getting pretty full of stuff by now, especially because I am an avid user of Garage Band, iMovie and iPhoto. Recently, when I was looking for ways to free up space on my hard drive, duplicate Garage Band projects and old DVD slideshows I had in iMovie were easy enough to find and delete. But if you’re like me, you’ve got .jpg files in folders all over your computer and finding duplicates or unneeded ones to trash for drive space recovery can be daunting at best.

iPhoto itself doesn’t help a lot either, because its many folders are not readily accessible in Finder and if you don’t think to open the app and search from inside it, you can easily miss an opportunity to recover lots of disk space.

When you’re importing the hundreds and hundreds of pics you’ll be taking this holiday season, remember to think about your iPhoto trash and empty it out once you’re sure you haven’t mistakenly deleted that once-in-a lifetime picture of Mommy kissing Santa Claus.

Thanks to Scott McNulty at MacWorld

I wrote my last “OS9 – Blimey Some People Still Use It” article for Mac DevCenter back in 2004 (see OS9, Mine All Mine); it was fun to write and nostalgic too, but I didn’t imagine I’d be writing a similar piece four years later.

But – blimey – there are STILL some people out there using OS9 and very happy with it too, thank you very much.

One of them is Jerad Walters, who runs publishing house Centipede Press and does so using a mirror-door 1.2 GHz G4, 1.25 GB RAM and 1.7TB of hard disk space spread across four hard drives.

But why, Jerad, why?

“My books are built with InDesign 1.5 and Photoshop 6 running Suitcase 8. The G4 boots up in about 30 seconds and then I have a QuicKey sequence that loads all applications in largest-chunk–of-RAM-required order (Photoshop first, InDesign second, etc). It is all up and running in a couple minutes.

“The speed of the Finder is simply draw-dropping. However, the speed of the Finder is OS X is also pretty quick, but there is just a responsiveness in 9 that cannot be matched by X.

“Menu and window actions all take place so quickly. Plus it is easier to tell windows from background from menus. There is a clarity to the OS 9 display that is lacking in OS X.”

For email, he uses Claris Emailer. For word processing, TexEdit. He makes use of the DragAnyWindow control panel for easier window management, and of HoverBar, a precursor to the OS X Dock.

Jerad does use OS X occasionally – it has a drive all to itself – but when he’s using it he misses things only found in OS9.

“I miss the Put Away command, and the regular trash can more than anything. There’s one thing I wish OS 9 had: an option for a toolbar for Finder windows; that is a really nice feature of OS X.”

So, OS9 users, this is your comments thread. Tell us why we’re all wrong to be using this newfangled OS X stuff.

Today is a day for Mac users to be happy. Why?

1. ONE: It turns out that we’re not the meanest bunch of technology users when our beloved kit is harshly criticized in the media. The Cult of Mac is a peaceful one compared to the rapid spine-chilling rage of the Church of Blackberry. It’s true. David Pogue said so.

2. TWO: Chris Pirillo is a kindly soul, and decided that today he would spell out five good reasons for switching to Mac. I’m not sure I agree with all of them (“social benefits?” euw, no thanks), but it’s always good to see former Windows users and prominent bloggers spelling out what a good idea it is to be running OS X.

3. THREE: At long last, we know how to create a text clipping containing the “@” character. Bring on the dancing girls! The band! Anyone got a spare barn we can use to put on a show?

In other news: that new Opera 10 alpha is really quite spiffy isn’t it?

(Photo used under Creative Commons license; thanks chrismear.)

Here’s a demo video for Star Walk, the astronomy app for iPhone and iPod I posted on yesterday. The more I look at this app, and the more glowing comments it gets from both reviews on iTunes and CoM readers, the more I wish I’d paid a little better attention in my college astronomy class.

Thanks to reader Cliff for sending it in!

Tap Tap Dance, from the makers of the wildly popular Tap Tap Revenge, is an all new music game for your iPhone or iPod Touch, featuring top hits from some of the biggest electronic artists in the world like Moby, Justice, Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, and more. Built on the 2.0 engine of the free app Tap Tap Revenge, Tap Tap Dance features familiar rhythm game mechanics, presented in an all new smoother, richer package for $4.99.

Tap Tap Dance features 10 dance tracks, including:

– Technologic by Daft Punk
– Zdarlight by Digitalism
– Phantom Pt II (Soulwax Remix) by Justice
– Stratosphere by Junkie XL
– Disco Lies (Remix) by Moby
– Midnight Madness by The Chemical Brothers
– Goldrush by Tiesto
– Compressor by Soul Magic Orchestra (Exclusive)
– Where’s Your Head At by Basement Jaxx
– Daylight (Exclusive Morgan Page Remix) by Sunny Levine

The game includes an exclusive track by Soul Magic Orchestra, and an exclusive remix by Morgan Page of Sunny’s Levine’s Daylight. Three of the tracks, “Technologic,” by Daft Punk, “Disco Lies” by Moby and “Phantom Pt II” by Justice come with their own exclusive themes, offering game players a portable interactive music video experience, right on the iPhone or iPod touch.

Tap Tap Dance game is available now in the US from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch and coming to select international App Stores soon.

UPDATE: This article has been corrected to reflect Shazam’s compatibility with iPhone only and not iPod Touch, as originally indicated. We regret any confusion our error may have caused.

I’ve been wanting to write about Shazam, the music discovery software app for iPhone, for a while now, but since it’s been around for a good while and is one of the most popular downloads on the AppStore, it didn’t seem there was any news there.

Shazam’s developers announced they have extended its database to include additional North American, Asian and European content, however, and Shazam now offers the facility to recognize songs in a database that has grown to include 8 million different songs.

“This increase in our database cements Shazam’s position as the leading mobile music discovery service in the world,” says Will Mills, Shazam’s Head of Music, and adds the app’s unique user experience “has made Shazam the perfect partner for mobile phone operators and handset manufacturers across the world.”

In September the company announced that more than 20 million customers had used Shazam to identify over 100 million tracks so far, numbers that are likely to continue growing along with the size of the app’s database.

Via Distorted Loop

Mac software maker Adobe Wednesday announced it will eliminate 600 jobs as the company blames weak consumer demand and the U.S. recession for less-than-expected fourth quarter revenue.

The San Jose, Calif.-based firm projected it would earn between $912 million to $915 million for the quarter ended Nov. 28, far below the $930 million Wall Street expected. Adobe had earlier estimated revenue between $925 million to $955 million.

Weaker than expected demand for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4, released in October, was given as one reason for the shortfall.

A version “Dope Wars,” the game that challenges users’ math and marketing skills as well as their street smarts (released for Windows some ten years ago) has been rumored to be coming to iPhone under the name Drug Lords.

The video posted here, from Pocket Gamer, UK, indicates it was to be available by the end of November, but a report Wednesday said it has been re-branded by the developer a-steroids and submitted for AppStore approval under the name Underworld, which, according to Pocket Gamer, should make it less controversial.

The game sets you up as a small-time drug pusher, selling your stash on the local street corner to other players, and even makes use of the iPhone’s GPS functionality, meaning you can be wheelin’ and dealin’ from your realworld local street corner.

Can’t wait to see what America’s scolds have to say about this one.

Via PocketGamer UK

Long term users of fabulous text editor TextMate could be forgiven for feeling a little miffed. Before Apple released Leopard, there was excited talk of TextMate 2, and much discussion about the fact that it would be Leopard-only.

But Leopard appeared and became old news and there was still no sign of TextMate. Updates on the TextMate blog were few and far between.

What’s up? Is TextMate 2 still going to happen?

The answer is a definite YES, but with the simple caveat: BE PATIENT.

This topic has bubbled up several times on the TextMate mailing list and developer Allan Odgaard has made it plain that TM2 is in ongoing development. But like anyone who takes pride in his work, he doesn’t want to release it (or even talk about releasing it) until he’s got it up to a certain standard.

Alex Payne made passing reference to this yesterday, in his post How I use TextMate, saying he feared it had turned into abandonware. A minor update over Thanksgiving put his mind at rest, but still raised the TM2 question for others. As for what it might include, see Peter Haza’s informed posts here and here.

So, just to be clear: TM2 is coming. It’s not abandonware. It’s hang-in-there-ware.

Or, in Odgaard’s own words: “Put TM 2.0 up there with Duke Nukem Forever and be positively surprised the day it is released :)”

(Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to Dmitry Baranovskiy)

Melodis Corporation looks to make manual searching and scrolling for telephone contacts a thing of the past on your iPhone with its free Voice Dialer, available now on the AppStore.

“Dialing by voice is a much simpler, more natural interface than scrolling through a long list of contacts,” says Keyvan Mohajer, president and chief executive officer of MELODIS Corporation. “Many voice-based dialers are unacceptable because they are too slow, particularly as the number of contacts grows,” he adds, saying, “The Melodis Voice Dialer scales easily to deliver speed and accuracy whether the user has 10 contacts or 10,000.”

Users can search for contact information or dial contacts automatically using different voice commands. For example, users can say “Michael Smith”, “call Michael Smith”, “call Michael”, and so on. Saying “call” before the name automatically dials the number. Users can also specify whether they want to call the contact at home, at work or on their cell phone.

The app uses the company’s proprietary Crystal Engine, which avoids the traditional approach of voice-to-text conversion for search, which the company claims can achieve higher accuracy compared to existing solutions.

Unlike Google’s Voice Search capability, which allows users to simply raise the phone to the ear and begin speaking, Melodis requires the touch of a button on the phone’s surface to activate its voice reception. The app is free, though supported by what the company describes as “non-obtrusive mobile advertising.”

We stumbled across Vito Technologies’ Star Walk app for iPhone and iPod Touch and found yet one more way for Apple’s mobile devices to make us say, “wow.”

Not quite a pocket planetarium, Star Walk does boast impressive, detailed graphics showing past and future astronmical events from any place on earth and is an easy to use, annotated guide to stargazing.

Available in six languages for $4.99, the app has gotten glowing reviews on the AppStore and the developers promise updates soon supporting improved night mode viewing and mapping for deep space objects. Yes, Google Earth is free, but would you pay 5 bucks to see into infinity?

When you’ve had it with commercial radio, after you can’t take one more suggestion from iTunes’ Genius or Pandora or somebody’s Last.fm playlist, turn to your Mac.

With Bitnotic Chill 1.0 your Mac can create 100% computer-generated, user-adjustable ambient music. Though purely machine made, Chill’s music is both relaxing and listenable.

Chill plays endless songs or, in Radio mode, an uninterrupted stream of unique tracks. Once played, songs can be saved in a variety of audio formats. Albums can be exported straight into iTunes to download to iPod or burn to CD. Each song is unique and royalty free, and can be used in any public space or project without licensing fees.

Nick Vardalos, owner of Cafe Bido in Sydney, Australia uses Chill as a royalty-free music alternative for his cafe and in music projects. He says, “It’s simple enough that you can turn it on and let it go do its thing, but for the electro-geek in me it goes deeper. I can export the songs it creates as MIDI files into pro production software and build on them, replace instruments, edit tracks, collaborate with friends.”

Created with musicians, as well as listeners, in mind, Chill has a variety of features that allow songs to be used in the studio or live. Individual tracks can be saved in MIDI, WAV, and AIFF formats. Count-in, song key and tempo info, and MIDI output allow performers to collaborate with chill in real-time.

Scott Burgess, Bitnotic’s principal, says, “Chill’s music is influenced by Eno, Debussy, and musique concrete, with some New Age thrown in. The songs can be mellow or they can be evocative, but they are always music.”

Available directly from Bitnotic, at $19.95 Chill is a cost-effective alternative to pricey publicly licensed jukebox and canned music alternatives for businesses wishing to provide music for their customers, as well as a cheap tool for musicians and producers wanting to incorporate electronica into their projects.

For the individual user, Chill can provide a welcome respite or a vibe to use for relaxing, meditating, or – ahem – working late into the night on this or that…

With the arrival, finally, of Apple’s Premium earphones with remote and mic, you can now use your iPod Touch as a telephone through the magic of free software from the VoIP pioneers at TruPhone.

Actually, that’s somewhat inaccurate. You’ve been able to partake of TruPhone’s magic previously using a microphone adapter that plugs into the dock connector, or a headset with built-in mic like the one that ships with iPhones, but now that Apple’s new headsets are on the way, TruPhone’s app seems much more interesting.

Once you’ve installed the software, you can make free calls–no matter where you are in the world–to other iPod touch owners, to customers of Truphone’s Internet telephony service and to users of Google Talk instant messaging service. Support for low cost calling to landlines (PSTN) is on the way, according to company reps, as is support for calling and instant messaging to Skype and MSN (free) and free check and set facilities for both Twitter and Facebook.

The software uses the iPod touch’s Wi-Fi connection to carry VoIP calls over the Internet to its destination. There is no monthly line rental, no subscription or other hidden charges, but it should be noted calls are not handed off to the cellular network if you move beyond or lose your WiFi connection.

Still, when you bought that iPod Touch, I bet you didn’t think you were getting a telephone, too.

First: here’s Dong Chang! (App Store) What is it, and what does it do? I think we’d better let the developer explain:

“It is every funny and easier to play. Try to sway your iphone/itouch Three dimensional direction, You can get three Hip-Hop’s accompanist. Whenever, any where you can dancing with your iphone/itouch. Come on, Move your body, geting Exercises! You will be enjoy it.”

Fantastic! Next!

Whacket! (App Store) “replicates the experience of playing your favorite racket sports – without the hassle of all those silly rackets.” Thank goodness for that. Rackets, eh? Who needs ’em?

Apple has given iPhone developers an early Christmas present, freeing them (somewhat) from the convoluted mess of ad hoc distribution.

Once an application has been accepted to the App Store by Apple, developers can now issue up to 50 promotional codes. The codes allow the recipient to download a full copy of the application for free. Presently, these codes can only be used in the U.S. iTunes Stores by using the “Redeem” link in the App Store. The 50 code limit is reset for each new version of an application, according to a report at MacRumors.

Presumably developers may continue to use the ad hoc model, wherein a special version of their app can be sent, along with a mobile provisioning file, to up to 100 users (beta testers and/or reviewers) who provide the unique device identification number of their iPhone or iPod Touch, for giving out copies of apps prior to their acceptance in the AppStore.

Fluid Tunes is a pretty cool free app from Majic Jungle Software that uses your computer’s camera to interpret movements of your head, hands or feet, letting you browse, play or pause your music in iTunes without touching your keyboard or mouse. It works on OS X 4.11 and higher and is a tiny (788K) universal binary.